Thursday, December 01, 2005

Dreaming Of A Mint Gedman

Looks like there are more Rich Gedman baseball cards than I thought. I figured Topps, Donruss, and Fleer from '82 to '90, plus some random Gedmans (Gedmen?) from oddball sets, like Sportflics. I didn't, on the other hand, figure on sets like '82 Coke, '84 Nestle, '86 Quaker Granola. There's also a Ralston-Purina set. Now that I think of it, I do remember digging through bags of cat food when I was little. Then you've got the "Canadian versions" of cards, which I also totally forgot about, Topps' being O-Pee-Chee and Fleer's being Leaf. And that mysterious "Topps Tiffany" set. And all these came out every year, and all included a Gedman. So we may be talking about dozens if not hundreds of cards to collect.

But I'm not letting that stop me. GQ06 (That's GedmanQuest 2006, new people. "Jeek" for short.) will go on as scheduled. For a really awesome story of one woman's friendship with Rich Gedman, click here. It's quite amazing. All right, kind of amazing. Being a Geddy fan helps one appreciate it, though.

Seeing baseball cards again has reminded me that my favorite skill, after being able to spin just about any object on my finger indefinitely, is being able to tell from a baseball card what stadium the picture was taken in.

The Xmas season started tonight, with Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer airing (in HD!) on CBS, and TNT showing A Christmas Story. Seeing Rudolph (not in HD!) reminded me of my sister's kids, since I was living at their house last December, and got to watch all the holiday specials with them. So I e-mailed my ten year-old niece, asking her if she tuned in for Rudolph. Now I don't know if you've gotten an e-mail from a ten year-old girl lately, or ever, but wow, that's quite a different experience. The letters are ten feet tall, and colorful. She's got a crazy pink background with little birdies. I felt like I wanted to print it out and slap it up on the fridge.

So now I know where you get your sense of humor from! AHA! Seriously, the Geddy story was great. I can't tell you how much I also followed his career, and I saw him play at the Fens dozens of times in the 80s. Good guy all around. As are you.